Julian Assange remains cut off from the world in Ecuador’s London embassy, shut off from friends, relatives and thousands of supporters, leaving him unable to do his crucial work, as John Pilger discusses with Dennis J. Bernstein.

In a recent communication between Randy Credico, an Assange supporter, comic and radio producer, and Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, Assange’s fear of arrest and extradition to the US was confirmed by the leader of the Russia-gate frenzy.

Credico received the following response from Schiff after meeting the the Congressman’s staff, in which Credico was trying to connect Assange with Schiff: “Our committee would be willing to interview Assange when he is in U.S. Custody and not before.”

Dennis Bernstein spoke with John Pilger, a close friend and supporter of Assange on May 29. The interview began with the statement Bernstein delivered for Pilger at the Left Forum last weekend in New York on a panel devoted to Assange entitled, “Russia-gate and WikiLeaks”.

Pilger’s Statement

“There is a silence among many who call themselves left. The silence is Julian Assange. As every false accusation has fallen away, every bogus smear shown to be the work of political enemies, Julian stands vindicated as one who has exposed a system that threatens humanity. The Collateral Damage video, the war logs of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Cablegate revelations, the Venezuela revelations, the Podesta email revelations … these are just a few of the storms of raw truth that have blown through the capitals of rapacious power. The fakery of Russia-gate, the collusion of a corrupt media and the shame of a legal system that pursues truth-tellers have not been able to hold back the raw truth of WikiLeaks revelations. They have not won, not yet, and they have not destroyed the man. Only the silence of good people will allow them to win. Julian Assange has never been more isolated. He needs your support and your voice. Now more than ever is the time to demand justice and free speech for Julian. Thank you.”

Dennis Bernstein: We continue our discussion of the case of Julian Assange, now in the Ecuadorian embassy in Great Britain. John Pilger, it is great to talk to you again. But it is a profound tragedy, John, the way they are treating Julian Assange, this prolific journalist and publisher who so many other journalists have depended on in the past. He has been totally left out in the cold to fend for himself.

John Pilger: I have never known anything like it. There is a kind of eerie silence around the Julian Assange case. Julian has been vindicated in every possible way and yet he is isolated as few people are these days. He is cut off from the very tools of his trade, visitors aren’t allowed. I was in London recently and I couldn’t see him, although I spoke to people who had seen him. Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, said recently that he regarded what they are doing to Julian now as torture. It was Correa’s government that gave Julian political refuge, which has been betrayed now by his successor, the government led by Lenin Moreno, which is back to sucking up to the United States in the time-honored way, with Julian as the pawn and victim.

Should be a ‘Constitutional Hero’

But really it comes down to the British government. Although he is still in a foreign embassy and actually has Ecuadorian nationality, his right of passage out of that embassy should be guaranteed by the British government. The United Nations Working Party on Unlawful Detentions has made that clear. Britain took part in an investigation which determined that Julian was a political refugee and that a great miscarriage of justice had been imposed on him. It is very good that you are doing this, Dennis, because even in the media outside the mainstream, there is this silence about Julian. The streets outside the embassy are virtually empty, whereas they should be full of people saying that we are with you. The principles involved in this case are absolutely clear-cut. Number one is justice. The injustice done to this man is legion, both in terms of the bogus Swedish case and now the fact that he must remain in the embassy and can’t leave without being arrested, extradited to the United States and ending up in a hell hole. But it is also about freedom of speech, about our right to know, which is enshrined in the United States Constitution. If the Constitution were taken literally, Julian would be a constitutional hero, actually. Instead, I understand the indictment they are trying to concoct reads like a charge of espionage! It’s so ridiculous.That is the situation as I see it, Dennis. It is not a happy one but it is one that people should rally to quickly.

DB: His journalistic brethren are sounding like his prosecutors. They want to get behind Russia-gate freaks like Congressman Adam Schiff and Mike Pompeo, who would like to see Assange in jail forever or even executed. How do you respond to journalists acting like prosecutors, some of whom used his material to do stories? This is a terrible time for journalism.

JP: You are absolutely right: It is a terrible time for journalism. I have never known anything quite like it in my career. That said, it is not new. There has always been a so-called mainstream which really comes down to great power in media. It has always existed, particularly in the United States. The Pulitzer Prize this year was awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for witch-hunting around Russia-gate! They were praised for “how deeply sourced their investigations were.” Their investigations turned up not a shred of real evidence to suggest any serious Russian intervention in the 2016 election.

Like Webb

The Julian Assange case reminds me of the Gary Webb (image on the left) case. Bob Parry was one of Gary Webb’s few supporters in the media. Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series contained evidence that cocaine trafficking was going on with the connivance of the CIA. Later Webb was hounded by fellow journalists and, unable to find work, he eventually committed suicide. The CIA Inspector General subsequently vindicated him. Now, Julian Assange is a long way from taking his own life. His resilience is remarkable. But he is still a human being and he has taken such a battering.

Probably the hardest thing for him to take is the utter hypocrisy of news organizations—like The New York Times, which published the WikiLeaks “War Logs” and “Cablegate,” The Washington Post andThe Guardian, which has taken a vindictive delight in tormenting Julian. The Guardiana few years ago got a Pulitzer Prize writing about Snowden. But their coverage of Snowden left him in Hong Kong. It was WikiLeaks that got Snowden out of Hong Kong and to safety.

Professionally, I find this one of the most unsavory and immoral things I have seen in my career. The persecution of this man by huge media organizations which have drawn great benefit from WikiLeaks. One of Assange’s great tormentors, The Guardian‘s Luke Harding, made a great deal of money with a Hollywood version of a book that he and David Lee wrote in which they basically attacked their source. I suppose you have to be a psychiatrist to understand all of this. My understanding is that so many of these journalists are shamed. They realize that WikiLeaks has done what they should have done a long time ago, and that is to tell us how governments lie.

DB: One thing that disturbs me greatly is the way in which the Western corporate press speculate about Russian involvement in the U.S. 2016 election, that it was a hack through Julian Assange. Any serious investigator would want to know who would be motivated. And yet the possibility that it might be the dozen or so pissed-off people who went to work for the Clinton machine and learned from the inside that the DNC was all about getting rid of Bernie Sanders…this is not a part of the story!

Eight Hundred Thousand Disclosures on Russia

JP: What happened to Sanders and the way that he was rolled by the Clinton organization, everybody knows that this is the story. And now we have the DNC suing WikiLeaks! There’s a kind of farcical element to this. I mean, none of this came from the Russians. That WikiLeaks is somehow in bed with the Russians is ludicrous. WikiLeaks published about 800,000 major disclosures about Russia, some of them extremely critical of the Russian government. If you are a government and you are doing something untoward or you are lying to your people and WikiLeaks gets the documents to show it, they will publish no matter who you are, be they the United States or Russia.

DB: Randy Credico, because of his work and his decision to devote a very high-profile series to the persecution of Julian Assange, recently found himself under attack. He went to the White House Press Roast and, after having a nice discussion with Congressman Schiff, he yelled out “What about Julian Assange?” The room was packed full of reporters but Randy was attacked and dragged out. It was if everyone there was embarrassed to recognize that one of their brethren was being brutalized.

JP: Randy shouted some truth. It is very similar to what happened to Ray McGovern. Ray is a former member of the CIA but extremely principled. I might suggest he is a renegade now.

DB: It was hysterical to watch these four armed guards who kept shouting “Stop resisting, stop resisting!” and they are beating the hell out of him!

JP: I thought the image of Ray being hauled off was particularly telling. These four overweight, obviously ill-trained young men manhandling Ray, who is 78 years old. There was something highly emblematic about that for me. He stood up to challenge the fact that the CIA was about to hand over leadership to a person who had been in charge of torture. It is both shocking and surreal, which of course the Julian Assange case is as well. But real journalism should be able to get through the shocking and the surreal and get to the truth. There is so much collusion now, with all these dark and menacing developments. It is almost as if the word “journalism” is becoming blighted.

DB: There has certainly been a lot of collusion when it comes to Israel. Then the word “collusion” is quite appropriate.

JP: That’s the ultimate collusion. But that’s collusion with silence. Never has there been a collusion like the one between the U.S. and Israel. It suggests another word and that is “immunity.” It has a moral immunity, a cultural immunity, a geopolitical immunity, a legal immunity, and certainly a media immunity. We see the gunning down of over 60 people on the day of the inauguration of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. Israel has some of the most wickedly experimental munitions in the world and they fired them at people who were protesting the occupation of their homeland and trying to remind people of the Nakba and the right of return. In the media these were described as “clashes.” Although they did become so bad that The New York Times in a later edition changed its front page headline to say that Israel was actually killing people. A rare moment, indeed, when the immunity, the collusion was interrupted. All the talk of Iran and nuclear weapons is without any reference to the biggest nuclear power in the Middle East.

DB: What would you say have been the contributions that Julian Assange has made in this age of censorship and cowardice in journalism? Where does he come into the picture?

JP: I think it comes down to information. If you go back to when WikiLeaks started, when Julian was sitting in his hotel room in Paris beginning to put the whole thing together, one of the first things he wrote was that there is a morality in transparency, that we have a right to know what those who wish to control our lives are doing in secret. The right to know what governments are doing in our name—on our behalf or to our detriment—is our moral right. Julian feels very passionately about this. There were times when he could have compromised slightly in order to possibly help his situation. There were times when I said to him, “Why don’t you just suspend that for a while and go along with it?” Of course, I knew beforehand what his answer would be and that was “no.” The enormous amount of information that has come from WikiLeaks, particularly in recent years, has amounted to an extraordinary public service. I was reading just the other day a 2006 WikiLeaks cable from the U.S. embassy in Caracas which was addressed to other agencies in the region. This was four years after the U.S. tried to get rid of Chavez in a coup. It detailed how subversion should work. Of course, they dressed it up as human rights work and so on. I was reading this official document thinking how the information contained in it was worth years of the kind of distorted reporting from Venezuela. It also reminds us that so-called “meddling” by Russia in the U.S. is just nonsense. The word “meddling” doesn’t apply to the kind of action implied in this document. It is intervention in another country’s affairs.

WikiLeaks has done that all over the world. It has given people the information they have a right to have. They had a right to find out from the so-called “War Logs” the criminality of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They had a right to find out about Cablegate. That’s when, on Clinton’s watch, we learned that the NSA was gathering personal information on members of the United Nations Security Council, including their credit card numbers. You can see why Julian made enemies. But he should also have made a huge number of friends. This is critical information because it tells us how power works and we will never learn about it otherwise. I think WikiLeaks has opened a world of transparency and put flesh on the expression “right to know.” This must explain why he is attacked so much, because that is so threatening. The enemy to great power is not the likes of the Taliban, it is us.

DB: And who can forget the release of the “collateral murder” footage by Chelsea Manning?

JP: That kind of thing is not uncommon. Vietnam was meant to be the open war but really it wasn’t. There weren’t the cameras around. It is indeed shocking information but it informs people, and we have Chelsea Manning’s courage to thank for that.

DB: Yes, and the thanks he got was seven years in solitary confinement. They want to prosecute Assange and maybe hang him from the rafters in Congress, but what about Judith Miller and The New York Times lying the West into war? There is no end of horrific examples of what passes for journalism, in contrast to the amazing contribution that Julian Assange has made.

Washington D.C. (NEO) – Aggression in all shapes and forms has been for a long time the tool of choice for Washington in its approach towards all of its foreign policy challenges. There are more confirmations of this notion in history that you will be willing to check up and those become particularly relevant today as Washington launched yet another aggression against Syria, acting on baseless accusations.

America has always been after the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, forcing countries that it managed to subject themselves to its will to turn their back on their values and traditions. That is precisely why the United States would be in a frenzy to destroy the cultural heritage of its adversaries during the Second World War days. Those who were following geopolitical events a couple of decades ago would remember similar frenzy manifesting itself in the destruction of Yugoslavia. Today, it’s distinctly visible in Iraq, Syria and a handful of other countries.

As a matter of fact, most experts in the West prefer to keep silent about the fact that Washington used to bomb cities off the face of the Earth together with their residents without any strategic rationale behind those acts. During the Second World War such German cities as Wurzburg, Hildesheim, Paderborn, Pforzheim, and especially Dresden were wiped clean by American bombers, with Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon disappearing in first nuclear blasts. However, Germany was not the only one to suffer from such barbarity, as cities in Italy, Austria, France, the Czech Republic, Romania and other European countries would be obliterated by US bombs just as easily.In the period from 1939-1945 Anglo-Americans bombers have almost completely destroyed the ancient French cities of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes, with German troops suffering little to no casualties during such assaults. As for Frenchmen, according to most skeptical estimates, they lost at least 60,000 people in such bombing runs.But these facts couldn’t bother Washington any less as it has its own approach for dealing with such unpleasant facts that is called distortion of history.

The blame for the ruined Dresden was put on the USSR, with allegations being made that a request to commit this war crime was issued by Stalin, allegedly at the Yalta Conference. But written records made during this conference show no trace of such demands. In fact, the decision to bomb Dresden was taken by Washington long before the Yalta Conference, but the massive bombing run was delayed due to bad weather conditions.

As individual researchers note, the sheer amount of ordinance that was dropped on Dresden produced two firey tornadoes, which would melt anything on their path, while approaching one another only to merge into one hellish inferno. The temperature in the epicenter of the tornado reached 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, melting steel and bricks together.

The decision to bring such devilish fire upon the heads of German civilians was provoked by Washington’s zeal for revenge. It wanted to pay back for the military disgrace, the lack of military brilliance in its generals, the lack of the necessary courage and skill to conduct successful military operations. Many historians and researchers estimate the resulting death toll reaching more than 100,000 people. However, neither Marshal Arthur Harris nor the killer pilots are remembered today as war criminals, as they entered the history of England and the United States as heroes.

Most people are ignorant of the fact that at the Oise-Aisne military cemetery in northern France, where American soldiers who perished in World War I are buried, there is a restricted Plot E section, that no visitor is allowed to access. At this site in Coleville, located a couple hundred feet away from the infamous Omaha Beach more than 10,000 American soldiers found their final rest. Yet, among them are 94 individuals executed during the days of the Second World War – those are American soldiers and officers who would massacre civilians, rape children and women alike before murdering them during the liberation of Europe from Nazism.

There’s no mention of Plot E at the site of the American Battle Monuments Commission even though there’s a section that explores the Oise-Aisne military cemetery in much detail. According to French historians, at least 443 American soldiers were found guilty of committing despicable crimes in Europe to face immediate execution at the hands of their superiors.

According to a well-known journalist Jesus Hernandez who penned a book under the title of One Hundred Secrets of WWII (100 historias secretas de la Segunda Guerra Mundial), a total of 90 soldiers out of the above-mentioned war criminals was hung. However, this number shows that nobody was really trying to catch those soldiers that were abusing the civilian population of Europe as the total number of American soldiers that were brought to Europe amounted to 11 million people, according to the data provided by such researchers as David Jordan and Andrew West.

However, those crimes are not the only ones that nobody was held accounted for, as one can remember the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war that was followed by a long list of unpunished crimes committed by US servicemen in that country.

There’s a growing number of reports about the use of torture by CIA that occurred in the course of Washington’s War on Terror. It turned out that the arsenal of methods for influencing a prisoner or just an interrogated person is extremely varied: a torture through inconvenient poses, sleep deprivation, music and white noise torture, use of direct violence together with a long list of other approaches!

Under these conditions, Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Cheri Haspe CIA Director in spite of her reputation of being a sadist has provoked a massive backlash in the American media. This serves as a clear indication that Trump is indifferent to the daily brutality of the CIA, which can get on par with the inhuman methods of Waffen-SS with the appointment of Gina Haspe. We must not forget about thousands of civilians who perished in Washington’s aggression against in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.

However, the United States is keen to make the countries affected by the American brutality to forget about the crimes committed against them. For example, the terrible bombing of French cities along the Bay of Biscay is not being taught in French schools and nobody is willing to talk about it these days in France. However, President Trump has gone even further by dismissing the sacrifice that the Soviet people made to liberate the world from the Nazi regime by declaring that the victory over fascism was secured by the United States.

There have been resistance movements in pretty much every single country occupied by Hitler, but those facts are disregarded just as well. Recently, the United States, Britain, France have stopped inviting representatives of Russia to the annual celebrations dedicated to the victory over the Nazi Germany. As if there were no Soviet troops entering Berlin in 1945. The West in its Russophobic frenzy is actively trying to persuade Europe and the rest of the world that Hitler was defeated by the US troops with a bit of assistance from the UK and that the USSR had nothing to do with it.

But monuments of the atrocities committed by the US cannot be completely destroyed. Facts cannot be completely erased from the history and memory of the obliterated Dresden, the French cemetery of Oise-Aisne, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam’s My Lai, together with the countries of the Middle East that lost hundreds of thousands of people as the result of unprovoked US aggression lives on.

It also can not be forgotten that millions of residents of the affected countries continue to insist that those who were behind the ongoing American aggression should be brought to trial, no matter how much Washington tries to rewrite the history.

Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) is allegedly involved in a series of crimes, including torture, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions, the State Department said in its annual human rights report released on Friday.

“Human rights groups and the United Nations noted significant deficiencies in investigations into human rights abuses committed by [Ukraine’s] government security forces, in particular into allegations of torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and other abuses reportedly perpetrated by SBU,” the report said.

The perpetrators of the 2014 Euromaidan shootings in the country’s capital Kiev have not been held accountable, the report added.

At the same time, the SBU continues to impose pressure on media outlets concerning “reporting on sensitive issues, such as military losses,” according to the report.The US State Department also noted that Ukraine’s government committed a series of human rights violations, including corruption, censorship and violence against ethnic minorities.

“Abuses included widespread government corruption, censorship, blocking of websites, government failure to hold accountable perpetrators of violence against journalists and anti-corruption activists, violence against ethnic minorities and LGBTI persons,” the report reads.

The State Department said the “most significant” abuses occurred in the Donbass region, where it said unlawful killings and politically motivating disappearances have occurred.

This article was first published on March 15, 2008 to commemorate the 4oth Anniversary of the My Lai Massacre

In a bitter irony, Colin Powell, who was responsible for the coverup of the My Lai massacre acceded to a “brilliant” career in the Armed Forces. In 2001 he was appointed Secretary of State in the Bush administration. Although never indicted, Powell was also deeply implicated in the Iran-Contra affair.

It is worth noting that Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the Gulf War, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers in what British war correspondent Felicity Arbuthnot entitled “Operation Desert Slaughter”.

“The forty two day carpet bombing, enjoined by thirty two other countries, against a country of just twenty five million souls, with a youthful, conscript army, with broadly half the population under sixteen, and no air force, was just the beginning of a United Nations led, global siege of near mediaeval ferocity.”

In the words of General Norman Schwartzkopf who led Operation Desert Slaughter “‘There was no one left to kill’…

There have been many US sponsored My Lais since the Vietnam war.

In a bitter irony, in 2018, Vietnam is now an “unofficial” military ally of the US against China

Fifty years ago this week, on March 16, 1968, a company of US Army combat soldiers from the Americal Division swept into the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, rounded up the 500+ unarmed, non-combatant residents, all women, children, babies and a few old men, and executed them in cold blood, Nazi-style. No weapons were found in the village, and the whole operation took only 4 hours.

Although there was a serious attempt to cover-up this operation (which involved a young up-and-coming US Army Major named Colin Powell), those who orchestrated or participated in this “business-as-usual” war zone atrocity did not deny the details of the slaughter when the case came to trial several years later. But the story had filtered back to the Western news media, thanks to a couple of courageous eye-witnesses whose consciences were still intact. An Army court-marital trial eventually convened against a handful of the soldiers, including Lt. William Calley and Company C commanding officer, Ernest Medina.

According to many of the soldiers in Company C, Medina ordered the killing of “every living thing in My Lai,” including, obviously, innocent noncombatants – men, women, children and even farm animals. Lt. Calley was charged with the murder of 109 civilians. In his defense statement he stated that he had been taught to hate all Vietnamese, even children, who, he had been told, “were very good at planting mines.”

That a massacre had occurred was confirmed by many of Medina’s soldiers and recorded by photographers, but the Army still tried to cover it up. The cases were tried in military courts with juries of Army officers, who eventually either dropped the charges against all of the defendants (except Calley) or acquitted them. Medina and all the others who were among the killing soldiers that day went free, and only Calley was convicted of the murders of “at least 20 civilians.” He was sentenced to life imprisonment for his war crime, but, under pressure from patriotic pro-war Americans, President Nixon pardoned him within weeks of the verdict.

The trial stimulated a lot of interest because it occurred during the rising outcry of millions of Americans against the infamous undeclared war that was acknowledged by many observers as an “overwhelming atrocity.” Ethical Americans were sick of the killing. However, 79% of those that were polled strenuously objected to Calley’s conviction, some veteran’s groups even voicing the opinion that instead of condemnation, he and his comrades should have received medals of honor for killing “Commie Gooks.”

Just like the extermination camp atrocities of World War II, the realities of My Lai deserve to be revisited so that it will happen “never again.” The Vietnam War was an excruciating time for conscientious Americans because of the numerous moral issues surrounding the mass slaughter in a war that uselessly killed 58,000 American soldiers, caused the spiritual deaths of millions more, killed 3 million Vietnamese (mostly civilians) and psychologically traumatized countless others on both sides of the conflict.

Of course the Vietnam War was a thousand times worse for the innocent people of that doomed land than it was for the soldiers. The Vietnamese people were victims of an army of brutal young men from a foreign land who were taught that the “little yellow people” were pitiful sub-humans and deserved to be killed – with some GIs preferring to inflict torture first. “Kill-or-be-killed” is a reality that is standard operating procedure for military combat units of every nation of every era and of every ideology.

Vietnam veterans tell me that there were scores, maybe hundreds, of “My Lai-type massacres “ during that war. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon refuses to acknowledge that truth. Execution-style killings of “potential” Viet Cong sympathizers (i.e., anybody that wasn’t a US military supporter) were common. Many combat units “took no prisoners” (a euphemism for murdering captives, rather than having to follow the nuisance Geneva Conventions which requires humane treatment for prisoners of war). The only unusual thing about the My Lai Massacre was that it was eventually found out. The attempted Pentagon cover-up failed but justice was still not done.

Very few soldiers or their commanding officers have ever been punished for the many war crimes that occurred during that war because those in charge knew that killing (and torturing) of innocent civilians during war-time is simply the norm – excused as “collateral damage.” After all, as US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later infamously proclaimed, “stuff happens.”

The torture was enjoyable for some – for awhile (witness Auschwitz yesterday and Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay today). And wars are profitable for many – and still are (witness the Krupp family of Nazi-era infamy and Halliburton, the Blackwater mercenaries, et al. today).

The whole issue of the justification of war, with its inherent atrocities, never seems to be thoroughly examined in an atmosphere of openness and historical honesty. Full understanding of the realities of war and its spiritual, psychological and economic consequences for the victims is rarely attempted. If we who are non-soldiers ever truly experienced the horrors of combat, the effort to abolish war would suddenly be a top priority (perhaps even for the current crop of “Chicken Hawk” warmongers in the Bush Administration).

If we actually knew the gruesome realities of war (or even understood the immorality of spending trillions of dollars on war preparation while hundreds of millions of people are homeless and starving) we would refuse to cooperate with the things that make for war. But that wouldn’t be good for the war profiteers. So those “merchants of death” must hide the gruesome truths and try instead to make war seem patriotic and honorable, with flag-waving sloganeering like “Be All That You Can Be.” Or they might try to convince the soon-to-be-childless mothers of doomed, dead or dying soldiers that their child had died fighting for God, Country and Honor instead of domination of the Middle East’s oil reserves.

Let’s face it. The US military standing army system has been bankrupting America at $500+ billion year after year after year – even in times of so-called “peace.” The warmongering legacy of the Pentagon is still with us, particularly among those “patriots” including GOP presidential candidate John McCain, who wanted to “nuke the gooks” in Vietnam. A multitude of un-elected policy-makers of that ilk are still in charge of US foreign policy today, and they have been solidifying their power to continue America’s misbegotten, unaffordable and unsustainable militarism with the huge profits made off the deaths, screams, blood, guts and permanent disabilities of those hood-winked soldiers who were told that they were ”saving the world for democracy” when in fact they were making the world safe for exploitive capitalism and obscene profits for the few. And the politicians entrenched in both major political parties, who are all-too-often paid lapdogs for the war profiteers, don’t want the gravy train to be derailed.

Things haven’t changed much even from the World War II mentality that conveniently overlooked the monstrous evil that was perpetrated on tens of thousands of unarmed, innocent civilians at Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, a war crime so heinous that the psychological consequences, immune deficiency disorders and cancers from that nuclear holocaust are still being experienced in unimaginable suffering 6 decades later.

Things haven’t really changed when one witnesses the political mentality that allows the 500,000 deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of the first Gulf War or the 1,000,000 civilian deaths in the current fiasco in Iraq.

So it appears that our military and political leaders haven’t learned anything since My Lai. The people sitting next to you at work are, like most unaware Americans, almost totally ignorant of the hellish realities of the war-zone, so they may continue to be blindly patriotic and indifferent to the plight of the “others” who suffer so much in war. They may think that some people are less than human, and, therefore, if necessary, can be justifiably killed “for Volk, Fuhrer und Vaterland.”

As long as most American citizens continue to glorify war and militarism and ignore or denigrate the peacemakers; as long as the American public endorses the current spirit of nationalism and ruthless global capitalism; and as long as the America’s political leadership remains prudently silent (and therefore consenting to the homicidal violence of war) we will not be able to effect a change away from the influence of conscienceless war-mongers and war profiteers. The prophets and peacemakers are never valued in militarized nations, especially in times of war; indeed, they are always marginalized, demeaned and even imprisoned as traitors. And one of the reasons is that there are no profits to be made in peacemaking, whereas there are trillions to be made in the biggest business going: the preparation for war, the execution of war and the highly profitable “re-building” efforts (“blow it up/build it up” economics), all the while ignoring the “inconvenient” but inevitable collateral damage to the creation and its creatures.

As long as we continue to be led by unapologetic and merciless war-makers and their wealthy business cronies and as long as the ethical infants in Washington, DC continue to be corrupted by the big money bribes, there is no chance America will ever obtain true peace.

And unless America stops the carnage, fully repents and offers compensation for the damage it has done, its turn as a recipient of retaliatory violence will surely come, and it will come from those foreign and domestic victims that our nation’s leaders have treated so shamefully over the past half-century.

Lauri Love could face solitary confinement and placement on suicide watch if sent home.

The extradition case of Lauri Love, the alleged hacker currently in the United Kingdom, is placing a spotlight on the detrimental prison conditions in the United States. On February 5, a British High Court decided in favor of Love in his appeal to remain in the UK, due to concerns over the physical and mental treatment of those incarcerated in American prisons.

In a February 6 appearance on the BBC, Love said he was “thankful that the ruling actually spoke to the conditions in the United States, which leave a lot to be desired, relative to here in the UK.”

According to The Intercept, Love — who has Asperger’s syndrome, depression, and asthma — said along with his family and medical providers that “he would likely kill himself if he were extradited to the U.S.”

An expert report from Simon Baron-Cohen which is cited in the High Court’s ruling, states that Love’s health conditions make him “much more high-risk than prisoners who only suffer from one of these conditions.” Love might face solitary confinement and placement on suicide watch.

As experts cited in the ruling describe, U.S. prisons are ill-equipped to provide mental health services to inmates. Not only do prison services fail to provide necessary support, studies indicate they actually make the problems worse.

The High Court’s ruling addresses the risk of suicide and Love’s mental health, referring to expert opinion and concluding “it would be oppressive to extradite Mr Love.”

While speaking to the BBC, Love highlighted the difference in sentencing length being sought between the U.S. and the UK.

“You don’t have any hope when you’re thinking of spending the rest of your life in prison in less than humane conditions,” Love said.

Prison conditions in the United States were similarly highlighted during the incarceration of Chelsea Manning.

Manning was held in solitary confinement, and underwent an “ongoing pattern of abuses” as her lawyer told Democracy Now!. Manning made multiple suicide attempts and was not given medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, resulting in a lawsuit against the Pentagon. Manning’s sentence was ultimately commuted by President Obama.

Lawsuits relating to prison treatment and mental health have been filed before, as The Intercept noted. Love’s case bears resemblance to that of Gary McKinnon, another suspected hacker who was not extradited from the UK because of mental health reasons, which as The Intercept reported was decided by Theresa May.

Though Love will not be extradited to the United States, the decision goes on to state that “prosecution in this country rather than impunity should then follow.” Love, who has been indicted in New York, New Jersey and Virginia, is accused of hacking and stealing data from U.S. government websites. He lives with his parents after being released on bail following his 2013 arrest.

anonymous-news.com

Just imagine for a second that you are alone in a small dark room while your head chained between your legs and you has been forced to listen same song again and again for number of hours and days with headphones which you can’t take off. Music torture has been normal practice for the CIA after it started its “improved examination program” in the early 2000s.

The U.S. Psychological Operations team member Sgt. Mark Hadsell, said:

“If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them.”

Any torment technique is of easy to refute merit — music torment was, partially, mainstream on the grounds that it appeared to be more tasteful to the general population. Anyhow to find out about the knowledge of individuals who’ve been subjected to these tunes is to see exactly how frightful it is to have a darling tune betrayed you.

Following are the list of songs which CIA used to torture their prisoners:

“Not even one of the 41 prisoners now in Guantanamo was captured by the U.S. military on a battlefield. Afghan militias and the Pakistani military were paid cash bounties for selling 86 percent of these prisoners into US custody. Imagine the “green light” given for other countries to practice buying and selling of human beings.”

January 11, 2018 marked the 16th year that Guantanamo prison has exclusively imprisoned Muslim men, subjecting many of them to torture and arbitrary detention.

About thirty people gathered in Washington D.C., convened by Witness Against Torture, (WAT), for a weeklong fast intended to close Guantanamo and abolish torture forever. Six days ago, Matt Daloisio arrived from New York City in a van carefully packed with twelve years’ worth of posters and banners, plus sleeping bags, winter clothing and other essentials for the week.

Matt spent an hour organizing the equipment in the large church hall housing us. “He curates it,” said one WAT organizer.

Later, Matt reflected that many of the prisoners whose visages and names appear on our banners have been released. In 2007, there were 430 prisoners in Guantanamo. Today, 41 men are imprisoned there. Shaker Aamer has been reunited with the son whom he had never met while imprisoned in Guantanamo. Mohammed Ould Slahi, author of Guantanamo Diary, has finally been released. These encouraging realities don’t in the slightest diminish the urgency we feel in seeking the release of the 41 men still imprisoned in Guantanamo.

Not even one of the 41 prisoners now in Guantanamo was captured by the U.S. military on a battlefield. Afghan militias and the Pakistani military were paid cash bounties for selling 86 percent of these prisoners into US custody. Imagine the “green light” given for other countries to practice buying and selling of human beings.

Aisha Manar, working with the London Campaign to Close Guantanamo, points out that “the rights violating practices surrounding Guantanamo are now a model for the detention and incarceration polices of the US and other states.”

This chilling reality is reflected in Associated Press reports revealing that the United Arab Emirates operates a network of secret prisons in Southern Yemen, where prisoners are subjected to extreme torture. This has included being trussed to a rotating machine called “the grill” and exposed to a roasting fire.

“Nearly 2,000 men have disappeared into the clandestine prisons,” the AP reports, “a number so high that it has triggered near-weekly protests among families seeking information about missing sons, brothers and fathers.”

One of the main detention complexes is at Riyan Airport in Yemen’s southern city of Mukalla. Former detainees, speaking on condition of anonymity told of “being crammed into shipping containers smeared with feces and blindfolded for weeks on end. They said they were beaten, trussed up on the ‘grill,’ and sexually assaulted.”

A member of the Yemeni security force set up by the United Arab Emirates told AP that American forces were at times only yards away.

“It would be a stretch to believe the US did not know or could not have known that there was a real risk of torture,” said Amnesty International’s director of research in the Middle East, Lynn Maalouf.

On January 9, 2018, WAT members tried to deliver a letter to UAE Ambassador Yusuf Al Otaiba, seeking his response to these reports. Security guards took our pictures but said they were unable to accept our letter.

Two days later, joining numerous other groups for a large rally, we donned orange jumpsuits and black hoods, carried placards bearing the number “41” and displayed two main banners. One said: “It would take a genius to close Guantanamo.” And the other: “We are still here because you are still there.